


Toumei Answer

by TheCinematicRevealThatBatmanIsDead



Category: Kagerou Project
Genre: Abrupt Ending, Changing Tenses, F/M, Gen, Hospitalization, I Don't Even Know, Or Route XX, Post-Canon, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 17:56:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6089188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCinematicRevealThatBatmanIsDead/pseuds/TheCinematicRevealThatBatmanIsDead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In hindsight, it all made sense. He read like a clinical checklist of warning signs. Childhood trauma, suicide of a close friend, two years as a hikkikomori, expressed feelings of helplessness in social situations, feels responsible for aforementioned suicide. It was easier to look at it clinically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toumei Answer

**Author's Note:**

> Much love to NinthFeather for beta-ing

I clamped the headphones over my ears and cranked up the volume until it drowned out the footsteps and busy murmuring all around me. I didn’t want to think about what had happened. I leaned back in the chair and let my neck go limp until I was staring at the ceiling, into it, through it. My muscles felt liquid, and I could feel the realization looming over me like a tidal wave. I wasn’t ready. In an effort to buy some time, I suppose, I closed my eyes and shed my biological form, retreating into the phone. I turned around and watched my body, Takane Enomoto, watched her chest rise and fall and her eyes twitch beneath their lids. I turned away from the screen and simply floated. 

Shintaro Kisaragi tried to kill himself. In hindsight, it all made sense. He read like a clinical checklist of warning signs. Childhood trauma, suicide of a close friend, two years as a  _ hikkikomori _ , expressed feelings of helplessness in social situations, feels responsible for aforementioned suicide. It was easier to look at it clinically. I turned around again, looking at myself through the screen. My eye, my physical eye, twitched, and my body shivered. How many times had I watched Shintaro sleeping like this, the guilt he managed to suppress in the daylight hours tearing him apart as he slept? How many times had I seen him shivering like this while I was trapped behind a glass screen? 

How often had I wished I could have done something for him, said something to make it all right? And what if he didn’t make it? How many nights would I lie awake, knowing there was something I should have done and clueless as to what it might be?

The girl shivering on the opposite side of the screen was no different from him. I crawled back into my body, leaving Ene behind and becoming Takane Enomoto again.

When I opened my eyes, a new song had begun, one that I recognized.

* * *

 

“Like this,” I tell him, and I open a video of Momo’s latest performance. Fearing contamination, he mutes it.

“No,” he says, closing the window. “I like what I’ve made. Wait ‘till you hear it before you try to water it down.”

I frown. “Fine. Run it.”

He does.

My first thought is that the echo turns the quarter notes into eighth notes. I make no attempt to hide the sour expression on my face. Shintaro merely sits, his stony gaze burning into me. The drums are deep and heavy, like a heartbeat, and the more I hear, the more nervous I get. 

“I think that’s enough,” I hear myself say, and I mute the song and pull the editor back up. “Next time, take it somewhere else for critique, okay Master?”

I laugh playfully at how hurt he looks.

* * *

 

He had added words to it since then. “Even though I tried to know you, there wasn’t a single thing I was able to solve.”

If only I could have gotten

a little closer to the answer,

then these days could have continued forever.

In the moment that I stop the ringing alarm

It becomes clear that everything is gone.

 

I hunched over, burying my face in the thick folds of my jacket. My breath came out in short gasps as my body convulsed and scalding tears streamed from the corners of my eyes, into the fabric or down my cheeks. I wept for the first time in years, wept like a child, because I finally understood Shintaro Kisaragi. 

* * *

 

I’m nineteen years old. The sun is setting. Ayano and I are on opposite sides of the hall. She smiles apologetically. “Someone energetic to pull him along. All I do is follow him around”. She looks at her feet. “I can’t do anything.”

 

I’m in a body that is not my own. I want to kill whoever did this to me. I open a door, and on the other side is the collective knowledge of humanity. I feel something pulling me through the door. Now I’m caught in the current.

 

The headline stares back unflinchingly at me. I search frantically for anything that can tell me it’s wrong, but I find only obituaries, memorials, funeral records, cold affirmations that Ayano took her own life. 

 

I should be twenty years old. I’ve found a home. Memories come flooding back. Ayano died because Shintaro is a heartless animal. I try smiling, thinking of the pathetic state he’s in now. It feels good. 

 

I vow to become what he needs. Someone energetic to pull him along. And when has what he needs, I’ll take it from him. 

 

It is August 13th. I’m watching him sleep. He cries. He apologizes. He shivers.

He’s in pain. I don’t like it, and I find that odd.

 

I have my body back. It’s strange being Takane again. It’s strange how little else has changed. I’m still behind a screen, watching him, unable to help.

 

The sun has set. Ayano breaks the news to Shintaro, apologizes, tries to swallow her bitterness, and he tries to play it off like he doesn’t care. They both fail, but neither one notices. My body is asleep on a park bench. The real(?) me is sitting in his phone, useless. Once he gets home, he doesn’t cry much. Mostly he just stares.

 

I’m twenty-one years old. I visit him as Takane this time. I find him bleeding. 

 

My hearing fades in and out. Lacerations to the neck and forearms, serious bleeding from ulnar artery. I call my roommate and tell her to tell my professors I won’t be in class for a few days. It strikes me as something Ene wouldn’t do.

* * *

 

“Ms. Enomoto? He’s conscious. Would you like to see him?”

When I entered the room, Shintaro slowly tilted his head to look at the door. I might have seen a weak attempt at a smile on his lips, but I doubt it. I didn’t want to ask him why. I knew why, to an extent.

I just wanted to see him okay.


End file.
